Clerkstuck
by shellebelle
Summary: A mash-up of iClerks/i and Homestuck. Karkat isn't even supposed to be here today! There's cussin'. Be warned.
1. Chapter 1

== Be Karkat

You are waking up not to your obnoxious 4 pm alarm, but to a loud, obnoxious ringing at 7 in the _morning_.

_"_Motherfuck what..._shit." _You are buried in your recuperacoon, but it's only been a couple hours that you've been asleep. Who the hell is calling you in the middle of the day? You poke your head up, your eyes no more than tiny slits.

_"_Oh my gog, this better be fucking important, _what?" _you croak into the phone. It takes several tries before the human wriggler on the other end gets his request out. "Oh _fuck _no, I just closed last night, fuckass! What the... _shit! _Okay, fine. Fine but if the boss is not there by twelve, I'm going to go to your house, haul you out of bed, pull your intestines out of your fucking _nose _and hang you with them!" You slam the phone down and haul yourself out of the recuperacoon, feeling dizzy and a little sick. You don't sleep well to begin with, and the less than three hours sleep you've gotten is nowhere near enough.

_"_FUCK!"

Twenty minutes later, you have your combat boots laced, your hoodie on over your horns and still-damp hair, and sunglasses because fuck the sun is too bright for your eyes. At least the light in the store will pretty much be the same. You get into your truck (gray-primer color, you've never had the money to get it painted properly) and drive to the Quick Stop, a small convenience store over on the other side of town.

You unlock the front door of the shop, but when you try to get the metal rolling doors to go up, you find that someone has shoved chewing gum in the locks. Putting the key into that will be disgusting and damaging and you have no desire to go trying to clean gum and saliva solution off of keys or locks. "Fuckin' barbarians," you mutter, your mood most definitely _not _improving by the minute.

Problem was, the store still looks closed. You sigh and get the tarp out of the back of your truck, the tarp that you usually put over John's bike when you bring him home nights, and you write with your hand dipped in shoe polish: YEAH, FUCKASSES, WE'RE OPEN! You hang the sign over the metal doors to the front of the building, then go to wash your hands. And then you curse again, get the shoe polish out a second time, and put the Alternian letters underneath the English ones, because you're a bilingual motherfucker.

Fucking shoe polish.

You make the coffee, and put out one of the newspapers the store sells. You get a quarter out of the till and go to a neighboring store and clean out the newspaper dispenser of all the other newspaper that your store is supposed to carry, but never seems to be delivered. Stupid dispenser. So easy to steal from...

You sigh again and stand behind the cash register, which has a cheery sign posted: _If you are going to shoplift, please let us know!_

You aren't even supposed to be here today...

The assholes start coming in strong today, and by 8:05 you're done being pleasant. You take money and make change and if you growl, they're just going to have to deal with it. And humans just don't know how to deal with trolls. Well, they're going to have to learn because you've been here for a long time and you'll be there for a long time to come.

Sometimes, for shits and giggles, you'll smile at humans with all your pointy teeth. You like to freak them out a little. It's because you hate your job, really.

But you don't know what else to do, so you stay there. And you _need _the job, now. You hang your life on it like a fucking human Christmas tree.

You were meant for something different. Something better. But you're damned if you know what that is.

Someone slaps a huge package of Fruit Gushers down on the counter. You know who that is. You smile briefly, a little less pointy because it's a real smile. But it also doesn't last long. Your real smiles never do. Your friends all know this.

_"_Hey, Egderp. How's school, fuckass?"

You call everyone 'fuckass', whether they're friend or foe. Sometimes you only say it internally.

John Egbert grins idiotically at you. "It's good! It'd be better if you were there, though..."

_"_Fuck, Egbert, don't nag." You know you should be doing something else. But damned if you know what...

He sighs. "I know, I know. But I wasn't expecting to see you here today! I mean, you dropped me off last night, and I was expecting to see you next around five today for movies!" It was Friday, after all. Movie night! He was always so excited for movie night...

_"_You'll still see me around for movies. And Terezi too, probably. I should be out of here by noon, cause the boss should be in by then. Then I can be bored to tears by your human excuse for movies..."

_"_It'll be good to see Terezi again! Aw, come on, you're just teasing. You know you love my movies..." He stopped, sniffed the air. "What smells like shoe polish?"

_"_Hoofbeast shit," you snap at him, but you've had this argument so many times you both have it memorized. (And you don't mind his movies that much...by now it's just tradition.) "I made the sign out of shoe polish. Smell won't come off..."

Just then, a customer comes into the store, slamming a DVD case down on the counter. "Do you know when the fuck the video store is going to open?"

John winces. "Um...maybe I should go... I got a class. See you around five, then?"

You growl a bit. "Yeah." You turn to the video store customer as John leaves. You have to be somewhat polite sometimes and you try to reassure the customer that the store will be open as soon as the video store clerk gets there...

_Gogdammit Strider, where the hell are you?_

Just then, the store's purrbeast leaps up on the counter, purring and rubbing up against the customer. "Hey, cute cat, man. What's his name?"

_"_Fuckass."


	2. Chapter 2: Gamzee and Tavros

= Be Gamzee

It's a motherfucking good day, full of miracles, but then, _every day_ is full of miracles. And you are a vendor of miracles. You are wheeling your best bro Tavros to your usual spot in front of the Quick Stop and RST Video Store.

You move like you've got music in your head at all times. You're about seven feet tall and you paint your face in a clown pattern. Your horns corkscrew up out of your wild black hair.  
>Sometimes you're disappointed that people find you so motherfucking intimidating. You're a sweet guy. You love people, both troll and human. They're all miracles.<p>

So many people, man, so many brothers to introduce to the miracle of organic happiness.

The sopor slime pies have been pretty good to you, but the human weed stuff is amazing, man. Amazing and sacred, some of the humans say. You can totally dig that, and so can your wheeled friend Tavros.

You think he might be more into it than you, if that's possible. After all, it takes away the pain, and not even sopor slime does that for him. Morphine does, but the humans won't sell that to you and it's expensive to buy on the street. E does things to Tavros that terrify both of them. But not weed, man. It makes Tavros all loose and relaxed. And stops the pain. Anything's worth stopping that pain.

Tavros' accident had done something for him, clarified things, made him realize what the brown-blooded troll was to him. Once that was clear, everything else became clear too. He spent every moment he could beside him, made sure he was safe and being taken care of. There were very few high-blooded trolls left, and the status still carried some clout. He spent every dime he had, and some he didn't have. It didn't matter. He had pull with the few troll doctors there were. He didn't have to threaten very often.

He soon found that it was better to sleep at the hospital too, because there were still some trolls who thought culling the sick was better than treating them.

And now they lived together and as long as Gamzee was there, no one was going to hassle Tavros. And Tavros didn't mind cultivating pot, or selling it, and he turned out to be a pretty good partner in the business.

Tavros is good at keeping track of money, and so you hand it all to him when you get it. He shoves it in his pants and sits on it, or sticks it in his boot. It doesn't even seem like he looks at the amount, but he knows precisely how much you have at the end of the day. And even in a wheelchair, those horns are motherfucking intimidating.

You lean against the wall after parking your friend's chair and pulling the brake. "Motherfucking miracles, man." You press the button on your transportable music broadcasting device and bob your head to the mad beats.

==Be Tavros

You grin at your best friend, your matesprit. You don't know what you'd do without him.

At seven sweeps, you'd gotten into a bad car accident. Your friend Vriska had stolen a car and asked you to go joyriding. You'd always had a difficult time refusing Vriska. You didn't know she was drunk off her ass.

When she got into a high speed chase with the human police, when she went the wrong way down a divided highway, when the car flipped and rolled and landed on a guardrail, sending said guardrail forcefully across your waistline, the people who cut you out of the mangled car weren't at all sure you'd make it. You had to be air-lifted to a trauma center with specialized troll doctors, and you coded twice along the way.

You awoke in excruciating pain, and paralyzed from the waist down. Your lusus was there, and he looked so sad that he couldn't do anything for you, and Vriska was brought in in handcuffs to look at you, to see what she had done. You looked up at her, and she looked down at you and a slow smile crossed her face, seeming almost happy about what she'd done to you. And then you heard the most terrifying thing in your life: Gamzee's roar.

You'd never seen your friend like that: His hair was wild, his shoulders hunched forward, teeth bared: predatory. He advanced on Vriska, and she and the human police with her backed up. Karkat leapt up and stood between the two of them, placing his hands on his moirail's chest. He was good at soothing Gamzee, even though it was much more difficult this time. "Breathe, fuckass. Just breathe. You can't help him if you're culled for slaying her." Gamzee pulled away when she was finally out of his sight, and stayed panting and snarling at the door for a little while after, his claws indenting the metal door frame, Karkat by his side, just patting his shoulder gently. And then his shoulders sagged, and he looked at you with his eyes so soft and sad. He sat next to you and held your hand and hardly ever left your side the whole time you were in the hospital. Your lusus was in no condition to help care for you, so Gamzee came to live with you.

When the pain became too much, and you couldn't get the right painkillers, and it seemed like no one could help, Gamzee helped you. He started you with sopor slime, which worked for a while. But where it calmed Gamzee, it just made you numb. Listless. For a while, that was enough, just to be out of pain, even if you slept all the time. But it wasn't enough for Gamzee.

He started trying to find something else for you, to take away your pain. He tried everything first, of course, because there was no way he was using Tavros as an experimental small round furbeast.

Anything he found that worked on him, he tried on Tavros.

Ironically enough, it was a while before they discovered weed. It worked like a dream, and Gamzee became obsessed with it-growing it, drying it, finding the best ways to smoke it.

You can't repay him enough, really. It would be enough just to be his matesprit, but he makes it seem like so much more than just filling a quadrant. The little things you do for him surely can't be enough, but he seems satisfied.

You don't know what you'd do without him. You join in on the head bobbing to the beat that Gamzee's doing, though with your huge horns, it tends to be a little slower...


End file.
